xcopy

to copy all files of a given type from one directory structure to another:

ex.
xcopy *.rb d:\temp /S /F

Video Conversion and Editing

Kurt Perry gave me some tips to get up to speed with dealing with video conversion and editing.

Utilities:
Super by eRightSoft is good for converting between formats and codecs
VLC - best all around player (installs needed codecs for people which is handy)
Sony Vegas - video editing
- the basic version is inexpensive and very user friendly

container notes:
determines the format of the video
WMV - the windows media format
- for best compatibility (to share with others)
AVI with the Xvid codec is a very good balance between video quality and file size

codec Notes:
MPEG1 - obsolete
MPEG2 - standard DVD quality
MP4 or H264 - HD quality

frame rate notes:
29.97 frame rate is standard, especially for home videos

bit rate notes:
The bit rate will largely determine quality and size of video.
4000 kbps is typical DVD quality
a variable bit rate is a nice option if available because certain parts of a video may not require a lot of detail (e.g. credits) while other parts you want to look nicer.

sharing digital video:
creating DVD's can be a nightmare having to deal with DVD's that won't play on a player. If sharing digital video with others, Kurt recommends creating a data disc CD/DVD with video files organized. Include a copy of VLC so whoever you share with will be guaranteed to have a good player, and format the videos in the WMV container for largest compatibility.

Not operator

Learned a new trick today for getting a regex to return a desired result. The following regex will find html anchor tags. The [^>] is the key part to make this work. The ^ is the regex NOT operator, so basically this says accept all characters until the next >. Very handy.

(?i)]+)>(.+?)</a>

Note: this expression isn't displaying properly, look it up with the link below.

http://www.mkyong.com/regular-expressions/10-java-regular-expression-examples-you-should-know/